Chop Chop Tennis

This week Gamerizon announced that all three of the company’s games, Chop Chop Ninja, Chop Chop Runner, and Chop Chop Tennis, have been downloaded over a million times apiece. Sometimes we see surprisingly high sales numbers from developers who have found success without the backing of a major publisher, but this shows that brand recognition is indeed possible for indies in the App Store.

There is another angle to this story, which is the big part that the Free App A Day program played in the success of the Chop Chop series. Chop Chop Ninja was one of the first games to shoot up the free charts due to the service and then stake its claim on top of the paid charts soon after. Since then, each game has been included in the service at some point in time. This is a testament to how useful marketing tools such as Free App A Day can be to budding developers.

On another related note, Gamerizon recently released iPad vesions of all three games in the Chop Chop series. We enjoyed all three on the iPhone and can certainly recommend checking them out on the iPad if you haven’t yet bought them.

Summer is on its way, and that means the French Open and Wimbledon will be beamed to your TV whether you like it or not. If you’re so inclined, you can now participate in the sport without getting off your couch, because Chop Chop Tennis just hit the App Store. The game stars characters drawn in the bobble-head style of the Chop Chop series, but this time there’s not a ninja to be found.

The first thing everyone considering buying this game should be aware of is that there’s no tutorial in Chop Chop Tennis. How to play the game is far from obvious, and many gamers will give up on it before realizing that there’s fun to be had. The only information you’re given on how to play the game is two screens’ worth of control inputs that illustrate the various swipes you can use. If you’re not all that familiar with tennis, however, these might not be all that helpful. We’re sure Roger Federer knows what drop shots, top spins, and slices are, but we had to figure them out for ourselves.

Fore!

Like in Wii Sports Tennis, your character moves automatically on the court, so the only thing you’re responsible for is swinging the racket. Since there’s no tutorial, however, we spent our first match slowly discovering this fact. Something else that dawned on us way too late is that the speed of your swipe determines the power behind your character’s swing. Once we figured that out, our game improved substantially. Again, this is basic information that is necessary to play the game, but it’s never explained to the player.

However, if you struggle through and figure out the basics of the gameplay, you’ll find that it’s actually kind of fun. You can play single or doubles matches, or you can progress through three different tournaments that are all more or less the same. A few practice modes are available to help you get acclimated to the controls, but you won’t come back to these once you get the basics down.

Because doubles is twice as fun.

Most sports games benefit from a multiplayer mode, but there’s none to be found in Chop Chop Tennis. We would love to be able to slug it out against real opponents, either locally or online, but no such option is available. So it’s just you against the computer, with four difficulty modes available. You can play as eight different characters, but they all play the same, and their looks don’t vary drastically either.

But despite those sizable drawbacks, we had a pretty good time with the game. Getting into long back and forth volleys against the computer becomes increasingly intense as they go on. You know one of you is going to slip up, but you don’t know when. And there’s nothing quite like being down by several points and making a glorious comeback to win the game.

Until they include a tutorial, however, we simply can’t recommend Chop Chop Tennis. The controls are too deep and unintuitive to be able to leave players on their own to figure out. We’re not even sure we discovered all the ins and outs, and we played the game for hours. But if you don’t mind a big learning curve and can’t get enough of the Chop Chop art style, you may enjoy this game. Just know that you’ll be on your own to figure it out.

Back in February we broke the news on two new games in the quickly-expanding Chop Chop series: Chop Chop Runner, which we reviewed last month, and Chop Chop Tennis, a sports spin-off. Now we have the first look at Chop Chop Tennis in action, plus several new screens and concept images.

Here’s the gameplay video we received from developer Gamerizon:

And here are some new screenshots and concept art for Chop Chop Tennis. More images can be viewed in the “screenshots” section to the right. We look forward to getting our hands on this interesting-looking game soon.

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